“B” Girl

This is a girl I just finished to hang as part of a show in February called "Text Me".  She's SO my favorite right now!  Each artist got to select a letter, so I picked "B" knowing all along that I was thinking "Bee".   We got to interpret our letter any way we wanted, and didn't have to have the actual letter in our piece.  I spent many weeks just walking around thinking, planning, problem solving, and testing things out before even starting on her and I really enjoyed that process.  She's on a 24×30" canvas, which is much larger than I normally produce…although I seem to be on a roll with large canvases right now.
She's mostly painted in oils, but her hair and iris's are in acrylic.  The background is made of book pages from a Gaelic/English dictionary published in the 1970's.  I selected it because the pages were kind of yellowing and the text was tiny so it would show as more of a graphic element than readable words.  I also like that there seemed to be many bird illustrations throughout.  I used quite a few birds in the background as a little nod to "the birds and the bees" since it's a February show…which equals Valentines Day in my head.  :)  I dipped each page in bees wax before applying them to the canvas. 
I'm really happy with how her wings came out.  They're a little bit translucent so you can see the thread "veins" behind them just like on real bee wings.  (Or my version of bee wings anyway.)
I also like that aside from being part Bee, she looks ethnically ambiguous too.  Adds a little mystery. 

~ k

p.s.  Look how different she is from my last version of a Bee Girl.  I'm so happy with how my work is evolving…finally.  :)  I still like the previous one…in fact she's hanging on the wall in my office…but the new one feels more like "me" if that makes sense.  I'm finally to a place where sometimes, when all the stars & planets line up right…I can actually paint what I picture in my imagination.